Cloppenburg Museum Village

The Cloppenburg Museum Village - Lower Saxony open-air museum in the Lower Saxon town of Cloppenburg district is one of the oldest open-air museums in Germany. The Museum's mission is to explore the rural monuments of Lower Saxony and document faithfully in examples.

The Lower Saxony Open Air Museum is a non-profit organization. Although the facility is not a matter to attract as many visitors who had the Cloppenburg Museum Village 2009 more visitors than any other museum in Lower Saxony ( 250,000 ). 2004 were among the visitors about 60,000 children and young people who perceived the museum services in the context of school education.

History

The Museum Village was built from 1934 on the initiative of the Council Cloppenburger study Ottenjann Henry, who was also the first director of the museum. The plant was officially opened on Ascension in 1936 and continued to grow in subsequent years. On April 13, 1945 six houses of the museum village were destroyed by artillery fire, including the Quatmannshof. The farm has been reconstructed faithfully until 1962. Successor, Henry Ottenjanns as museum director in 1961, his son Helmut Ottenjann. Since 1996, Uwe Meiners is the director of the museum.

Task

The Lower Saxony open air museum today acts as an educational and research institution for cultural and agricultural history. Specifically, it has " the task to explore the rural monuments of Lower Saxony and documented in the most important examples realistically [ ... ] at the same time the various kinds of ancient crafts are collected in rural areas, are explored and demonstrated in full possible range. " The educational museum offers should be action-and product-oriented.

To the houses, furniture, appliances and other items of daily life exhibit appropriate, the Village Museum also operates its own research. Involved disciplines are folklore, regional history and house research. A team of three scientists, supported by volunteers and project partners, organized exhibitions and designed and supported the building of new houses. Documented this work in scientific publications that published the museum village to a large extent in its own publication series. Is supported by the scientific staff craftsmen who hold numerous houses repaired and visitors demonstrate traditional ways of working.

For maintenance work on buildings in the Village Museum receives since 2009 by Carola Desert Field Foundation 50,000 € per year.

Offers

The Lower Saxony open-air museum on an area of ​​about 20 hectares, the history of the rural area of Lower Saxony from the 16th century to the present. In more than 50 historic buildings with the associated rural gardens and other agricultural areas of change is discussed in relation human-environment.

Initially, the form of reconstruction was chosen as the prototype showed the primal stage of construction of houses. Major building types of the Low German hall house and the East Frisian Gulfhauses be presented. Since the 1970s, houses are made while preserving the traces of its history and with links to the biographies of its inhabitants again.

In addition to buildings, the agriculture and the crafts served, and homes of farm workers are located on the grounds of the museum village of Cloppenburg also a half-timbered church from small Escherde ( 1698 built ) and a peasantry school from Renslage (built in 1751 ).

Outside of the actual grounds of the museum village Höltinghauser road is north enunciated the great moor plow " Oldenburg " in front of the exhibition hall.

Agriculture and crafts - residential and farm buildings

The many rural buildings are compiled mainly to farm buildings. Mention may be made especially of the court Quatmann ( from Mittelsten, built 1805) and the court Wehlburg ( from Wehdel, built in 1750 ), but also farm Hoffmann ( from Goldenstedt, built in 1835/1840 ). These houses are low German Hall houses. Gulfhäuser are the yard Awick ( from Scharrelmann, built 1822) and the house Meyer ( from Firrel, built in 1900 ). As the youngest building came 2011, the home of a wheelwright from Westerstede added ( with components from the year 1566).

The museum is situated next to farmers, Heuer and farm workers houses numerous examples of rural crafts, such as it was to exercise well into the 20th century: wood turning, pewter, hoof and wagon coppersmiths, Lederschuhmacherei, clog making, carpentry, carpenter shop, brewery, cooperage, blue dyeing, saddlery, pottery, gold and silver as well as technical monuments such as mills and engines. Thus, a large part of the traditional crafts in rural areas is documented.

Mills

Since 2008, the museum village is a station on the Lower Saxon Mill Road. The travelers on this scenic route, it offers:

• , probably built a windmill from eaters ( Nienburg ), also called stand mill about 1638
• Called a cap windmill Bokel ( Cloppenburg ) from 1764, a Dutch gallery, also octagonal windmill or just "Dutch "
• A Dreschblock
• A Kokerwindmühle from Edewecht ( county Ammer country) from 1879, originally designed as a water pumping mill
• A horse mill from Mimmelage (District of Osnabrück ); a wooden mill, horses Goepel, to grind the grain, built around 1850 until 1890. With the help of horses grain was milled. The other one in the threshing and grain barn of the farm Wehlburg horse mill dating from 1868 is the last remaining horse mill in Lower Saxony.

Cap windmill

Millstones of the cap windmill

Kokerwindmühle

Horse gin in the barn of the farm Wehlburg

Collections and Exhibitions

Only part of the collections of the museum village is to be seen in the houses on the site. Much of the furniture, tools, carts, textiles, tin objects and archives on the other hand kept in the depots and presented to the public by means of selected examples in changing special exhibitions in the castle Arkenstede, the exhibition hall at the parking lot, Münchhausen's barn museum didactically. In the longer term to see are exhibitions about agriculture and technology, feature antique furniture and nobility in northwestern Germany.

Bentheim Landschwein

Westphalian Totleger

White doves at the castle Arkenstede

On the grounds and traditional breeds of domestic animals such as the pig and the Westphalian Bentheim country Totleger are presented.

In the collections of the museum is the famous meteorite Oldenburg ( fragment Bissel ', 4.84 kg ), which in 1930 in the villages Bissel (municipality Großenkneten ) and Beverbruch (municipality Garrel ) has fallen from the sky. The copy is not on public display.

Events

Since 2002, takes place every year between Christ's ascension and the Sunday before Pentecost a " garden section " on the grounds of the museum village of Cloppenburg instead.

In 2011, a "Historical Village Fair " and a Nikolausmarkt were built in the Cloppenburg Museum Village for the first time.

Historic Village Fair on the Brink

The " genius loci "

The founding of the museum in the Nazi era (1934 ) gives rise to the question of whether it was made against the background of Nazi blood - and-soil mythology. Thus, Sabine J. S. Bard Hofer -Paul in 2009 in her thesis succinctly without explanation states: " As the first major German Open Air Museum is considered the Museum Cloppenburg, in Lower Saxony, which was opened in 1936 under the direction of Heinrich Ottenjann. That this was done using the National Socialist government and served the ideological purposes, is evident. "

The foundation of the museum village Cloppenburg is to be considered especially in the context of the history of the home movement: This was already around 1880 as a reflection of urbanization of Germany and the interest of many city dwellers to a memory of their agricultural roots. This movement out the Ammerlander farmhouse in Bad Zwischenahn and 1912 the Rauchkate in Neuchâtel were in the land of Oldenburg 1910, emerged as sensually tangible memorials. In Cloppenburg even a local museum was founded in 1922.

So Heinrich Ottenjann developed before 1933 the concept of the museum village of Cloppenburg, he could then be realized in 1934. At the same time Ottenjann was inspired by the holistic concept of the Scandinavian open-air museums, trying to represent the objects in documented history of the rural population in their functional contexts.

The Nazis advocated the idea of ​​promoting home care and instrumentalized and ideological nascent ethnographic - historical agricultural system. Under the auspices of the Gauleiter Carl Röver the museum village should be a collection of ideal-typical farmhouses of the Oldenburger Munsterland country, as it as " built Baufibel " the "right [ s ] sense and the right attitude " for the craft and the ideology of a " new, healthy peasantry should " convey. Nevertheless, the Museum Cloppenburg was never. , In the sense to a Nazi cult site such as the also supported by Röver project Stedingsehre in Bookholzberg, and there were circles of the Nazi Party and opponents of the museum village project

Today in the museum village regularly events that will inform you of Nazi evil spirit. The staff at the museum village itself be enlightening works: For example, they comment on the thesis that the horses' heads to the Lower Saxon farmhouses (Hall houses) had originally been remnants of horse sacrifices, so that this was a common by the Nazis myth that was not consider critical scientific review.